Bizarre! -
Lynchings in Congo as penis theft panic hits capital
By Joe Bavier Reuters - Tuesday, April 22 06:21 pm
KINSHASA
(Reuters) - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers
accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a
wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged
witchcraft.
Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West
Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains
widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts
still occur.
Rumours of penis theft began circulating last week
in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8
million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with
listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis
wearing gold rings.
Purported victims, 14 of whom were also
detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make
their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an
attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.
"You just have
to be accused of that, and people come after you. We've had a number of
attempted lynchings. ... You see them covered in marks after being
beaten," Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on
Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort
to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12
suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27
men have since been released.
"I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke," Oleko said.
"But
when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there,
they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To
that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried
it'," he said.
Some Kinshasa residents accuse a separatist sect
from nearby Bas-Congo province of being behind the witchcraft in
revenge for a recent government crackdown on its members.
"It's
real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw.
What was left was tiny," said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone
credits near a Kinshasa police station.
"Worrying is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you anywhere."